A Gift From 'Norma Rae'

By ELYSE ASHBURN

In the climactic scene of the 1979 movie Norma Rae, Sally Field, playing a southern textile worker, scrambles onto a table and holds a cardboard sign overhead. It reads simply "UNION." And it halts work in the factory.

The real-life sign, which 33-year-old Crystal Lee Sutton hoisted six years earlier, is lost to history. But Ms. Sutton,...